The Greatcoat (11 page)

‘It’d better ruddy well be there. If I’ve dropped it in the mud—’

‘It’ll be by your bed,’ said Isabel.

He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, at the white glare of the winter afternoon.

‘Better get a move on. I can take you back on the bike, Issy.’

She fastened Syd’s jacket and put on the helmet as they crossed the fields to the lane. Now she felt bolder. She was Alec’s girl, who rode pillion on his
bike
. But as they came out of the hut, Isabel heard the sound that had haunted her childhood: a Lanc’s engines – Merlin engines. An engine caught, then roared into life. And then the next, and then the next, and then the next. Port outer, port inner, starboard inner, starboard outer. The engines roared at full throttle, then the sound eased and died back.

‘That’ll be N-Nora,’ said Alec.

‘You can’t know that!’

‘She’s had repairs to the port outer. They’re testing,’ he explained, as if to a child, but she saw that he was already more than half over the border into his own country beyond the wire, in the engine noise, knowing what every reverberation meant. The intensity of his listening seemed to pull the sound towards them.

‘You’ve got to go,’ she said, before he could say it.

‘Yes.’

But he stood irresolute, his eyes on her. She realised that he was waiting for something, and then she knew what it was; nothing high-flown, just the jacket he’d borrowed for her from one of his crew. ‘You’ll need this,’ she said, stripping off Syd’s jacket. ‘Here.’ She was already pulling off the leather helmet.

‘You won’t be cold?’

There was something graceless in the way he asked the question, as if it didn’t much matter whether she was cold or not. She was suddenly not quite real to
him
. Isabel shivered with the sudden lifting-off of the warm sheepskin lining, and with the sense of her own self suddenly ghost-like. Alec’s mind must be elsewhere; surely he wouldn’t leave her like this otherwise, in the middle of nowhere, without a coat. ‘Feel how thick my jumper is,’ she said, wanting to make something better of it than the reality. ‘I’ll be warm as toast. I’ll go back across the fields.’

Alec folded the jacket, tucked the helmet inside and strapped it to the carrying rack. ‘You sure?’

‘Sure.’

He swung himself onto his motorbike and kicked down on the starter. He was leaving. She reached out, and touched the leather of his jacket, as if for luck, but he didn’t notice. As the bike moved forward he gave her a thumbs-up, and then the wheels spun in the dry mud and he was gone.

The roar of his bike vanished instantly, as if cut off. Wintry quiet enveloped her. Dry leaves rustled where they had drifted at the foot of the hedge, and the same thrush hopped through the undergrowth. She’d need to get going. She had to walk back to town, and by the time she got there it would be dusk.

But Isabel did not turn in the direction of the town. Instead, she walked the other way, towards the airfield. She had to see it again.

There was no sound of aircraft. No vehicles
passed
her. The lane was narrow and overgrown. She walked steadily, keeping her eyes down until she had rounded the lane’s curve and knew that if she looked up she would be able to see the broken wire and the huge emptiness of the airfield.

She heard an engine behind her. Almost as soon as she heard it, the lorry was on her. It swept past with its canvas-covered load, so close that it grazed her sleeve. The driver didn’t even sound his horn. She jumped back, and as she did so a second lorry passed, and then a third. She waited, pressed against the hedge, while the convoy passed. There must have been ten lorries. She saw their drivers’ faces, tired and indifferent, pushing on. The smell of exhaust gripped her throat. She was trembling. The lorries had ploughed past as if she were nothing. The men didn’t glance at her.

But still she was drawn onwards, towards the perimeter fence. Suddenly the air filled with sound, as if someone had turned up the volume switch on a radio which had been playing, muted, all the while. She heard engines, and, above the noise of the engines, she heard voices.

The guardhouse roof was intact. Figures in uniform moved around it. Lorries were passing through the gate, one by one, stopping by the guardhouse for the driver to show his papers, and then moving on.

She looked along the perimeter fence. It was perfect. The airfield’s buildings were complete. There it lay, a hastily built city with its temporary air hardened by use. She scanned the low curves of Nissen huts, the brick admin block, the control tower with tiny figures visible through the unbroken glass windows. Somewhere there would be a bomb store, camouflaged against air attack. Charlie knew all the names of the bombs, and how heavy a load the Lancaster could carry in its bomb bay. Tallboy, Wallis bouncing bomb, cookies and Grand Slams. As the bombers lumbered above their heads, climbing, Charlie would guess at where they were going and what they were carrying, just as if he’d been in the briefing with the crew who were now passing above them, and had seen the chart with its routes marked by tape.

In the distance, a tractor hauled a long train of bomb trolleys. She shaded her eyes and stared into the hangar opposite her. Through the dazzle of winter light she thought she saw the shadow of a Lanc, with ground crew swarming over it. Must be serious damage, she thought, or they’d do the repairs out at dispersal.

Isabel closed her eyes. Waves of sound beat against her ears: the noise of a hive, full of purpose, humming with its own life. Alec was in there somewhere.
He
would smell of Isabel, as she smelled of him. If she was real then he was real too.

She and Charlie had both known the outlines of aircraft. They’d fought to be first to identify each one as it flew overhead. Once, only once, it had been a Junkers 88, in broad daylight, coming in so low that a ploughman had said in the pub, ‘I saw his dom face.’

Now she opened her eyes and saw the face of the airfield. It was here. It was not a ghost, or if it was one, then she was too. It had imprinted itself too deep for time to wipe the landscape clean. The air crew cycling from mess to barracks would be glad of the dry weather. Even so, there was mud wherever she looked, and she saw how it would deepen and become a sea as winter wore on, and then it would freeze, and thaw, and freeze again. The mud would be there, churned by boots and wheels, until spring came. The mud would outlive the men.

‘Alec,’ she said under her breath. The sky was loud with the noise of Merlin engines. She moved forward until she was pressing her hands to the fence, but no one turned or appeared to see her. The wind blew harder, and the windsock by the taxiway closest to her filled with it and pointed at Isabel. It seemed to be the only thing that knew she was here.

Her body ached from the wind. It was so cold; she couldn’t remember ever being so cold. Why had
she
told Alec she would be warm? The wind penetrated her. She was raw to the bone and yet she couldn’t leave. She had to watch them. A couple of ground crew walked past her, along the perimeter track. One of them whistled tunelessly in the teeth of the wind. The other talked animatedly, as if to himself, about a football game. His words trailed past Isabel in snatches. His boots, striking the concrete, were clodded with mud.

They were gone. The fence dissolved and Isabel clutched at nothing. There was the control tower with its windows broken and obscenities scrawled on the brick. She saw that the corrugated iron roof of the guardhouse had rusted. Every soul had vanished, as if blown away by the wind. But they were still there, she knew that. It was only that, at this moment, she couldn’t see them.

Alec was at her side.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘I had to see you.’

‘Waiting for me? But you can’t have been – you’ve only just this minute left me.’

‘Listen. Ops are on for tonight. Briefing’s at four. Nothing’s been said but the gen is we’re off to the big city again. Listen, Issy. I’ll come to you straight after the debrief. It’s only quarter of an hour on the bike. I’ll knock on your window. Swear you won’t go to sleep.’

‘I never go to sleep. But be careful on the bike – you won’t have slept – you’ll be so tired—’

‘There’s no traffic at that time.’

‘You’ll be all right, Alec.’

‘I know I shall. Only four more ops to go, counting tonight. Four’s got to be a lucky number – four-leaved clover, remember? – Besides which I’ve got your knickers, air crew, for the protection of.’

She laughed. He had stolen her pre-war silk knickers, the ones she kept for best because you couldn’t get anything like them these days. Except that there wasn’t any ‘best’ with Geoff and so they’d been hidden away in the back of her drawer, until Alec came. Geoff thought that women who wore fancy underwear were whores.

The knickers went with him on every op. He wouldn’t let her wash them. She pretended to be shocked, but she knew it meant there was nothing of her that he didn’t want. She hadn’t known it was possible for a man and woman to be like this. His crew thought Alec’s silk gloves were their mascot, and he let them believe it. How tired he looked, she thought. Sucked dry. The bones in his face were sharp. He was due leave again in ten days’ time, but the crew didn’t want leave. All they wanted now was to finish the tour. They wanted it so much that it was like possession. Once Alec had let his guard
down
and talked of the future: what they might do. He’d be screened for six months at least after the tour. They’d meet in York or Lincoln, depending on where he was posted. They’d get a hotel room. They’d find a way. Those places were full of wives coming to join men on leave. They’d be just another couple.

He only talked about it once. It was bad luck to talk about the future. No, that wasn’t it, not exactly. He’d tried to explain to her. He had to be 100 per cent here, now, there couldn’t be any part of him that was absent. He had so much in his mind – all his training, all his experience, those nights when you either came back or you didn’t, and if you did you came back with new, sharp, hot fragments of knowledge. It all had to fit together. It had to be remembered instant by instant. He had to hold it all in his mind, so that it wasn’t even like thinking any more, it was all there without him having to think about it. And then his mind was free to do the other things, beyond his training, that might keep them alive. It was that freedom which made him faster by a fraction of a second when Syd’s voice banged through the intercom: ‘Corkscrew port go go go—’

She thought he looked exhausted. No, he told her, he wasn’t finished yet, not by a long way.

‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily,’ he said.
Then
he was silent, frowning. She knew from his face that there was something more he wanted to say.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s Rod,’ he said. ‘He’s not so good.’

‘What’s the matter?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s nothing. These bloody stand-downs are getting on everyone’s nerves.’

He was silent again. He’d told her once that there was another look you saw sometimes. When you saw it you didn’t say anything. Just glanced away again and kept on putting your clobber into your locker or whatever else you were doing. The chop look. She’d asked him what it was. He’d said there was no other word for it: it was what it was. Crew had it when they weren’t going to come back. They didn’t know it, but something in them did and if you were unlucky you glimpsed it.

‘The chop look,’ she’d repeated, her face twisting as if she’d tasted something foul.

‘That’s it. But I’m telling you, you’ll never bloody see it on my crew.’

He had never mentioned it again. Now he said, as if he were arguing with someone, ‘He’s a bloody fine wireless op, though.’ She put her arms around him and leaned into his chest. Now the wind had to blow past them, because there was no space left between them.

‘You shouldn’t be here. You should go home, Issy,’ he said in her ear, but she knew he didn’t want her to leave him.

‘
You
shouldn’t be here,’ she answered, ‘I don’t know how you got off the airfield.’

For the first time she sensed the outline of something within him, like a vulturous shadow leaping between them. It flapped there in huge distortion, then he folded it into himself again and crammed it down. No, she thought, not distortion. It was real.

She remembered the words her mother had said long ago, when she had perched on Isabel’s bed to comfort her for a day of troubles that ended in soaked, helpless crying. Her mother had said, ‘Don’t cry, darling. It will all look different in the morning.’ She could remember her mother’s words but not what had come next. Had Isabel stopped crying? Or maybe it had never happened, any of it. Her mother had been gone for so long that Isabel was beginning not to know where memory ended and making her up began.

It will all look different in the morning
. Nothing worse could be said. He knew what had to happen before there was morning for him. She held him close. She knew the odds too but they couldn’t apply to Alec. He was so much here and so much himself;
present
, as they used to say at school when the register was
called
. How could someone be present and then ripped out of life in a few hours’ time? But there was nothing easier. He knew it, and he’d made her know it.

The night-fighters would come in from underneath to attack the belly of the Lanc on the inward run when she was bombed up. That’s why you had to keep weaving, so the rear-gunner had a chance of spotting them. Last week they were waiting for the bomber stream over the Dutch coast, beneath thin cloud cover. They got a Lanc on his port side, two hundred feet below. It came at him in a ball of light. Pulse after pulse of explosion rocked them. There was no plane, no men, no parachutes, no nothing. Already he was corkscrewing. Syd’s voice on the intercom, more peevish than anything: ‘Fuck it I’ve gone blind.’ Metal rattled on the fuselage – flak or Lanc debris, he didn’t know. He was up to altitude again and he hauled her into the second dive. When they levelled out there was Syd’s voice in his ear, back to normal, as if nothing had happened, ‘Keep weaving, Skipper.’